Time stopped. The radio seemed to shimmer and throb. The music was barely there, just snaps and bloops and empty space. The voice sounded distant and mysterious, and it also sounded like someone whispering in your ear. I’d never heard the song before, but it immediately sounded familiar. That’s how I remember it, anyway.
I forget where I was going or what I was doing when I first heard “Royals,” the random hit that became an out-of-nowhere phenomenon. The song didn’t immediately imprint itself on my brain in the way that some game-changing hits do. Instead, it insinuated its way in there, and it lingered. Nobody had ever heard of Lorde, the singer of that weird new song, but the track was immediately everywhere. It turned out to be the debut single of a 16-year-old singer from New Zealand, which seemed impossible. How does this happen? But it happened. Lorde’s “Royals” snuck up on the world and became a juggernaut, at least in part because it did things that juggernaut pop songs are not supposed to do.
If I’m remembering this right, the first time I heard “Royals” was on my local adult alternative station, where it immediately stood out from the performatively folky songs that tend to serve as the bread and butter over there. But when “Royals” crossed over to pop radio, it sounded just as out of place. It was soft and still and slinky. It made fun of big-money consumerist pop tropes even as it indulged those tropes. There was no press hype around “Royals,” and it might’ve been the last time that I encountered a big new hit on the radio without already knowing the full context behind the song. In retrospect, it’s funny that “Royals” worked so well as a radio song, since it seemed custom-built for the internet, and since it foreshadowed a new pop era when internet was all that mattered.
When “Royals” blew up — first a stealthy slow-build hit, then an out-of-control boulder rolling downhill — people were quick to jump to conclusions. Maybe the era of precision-tooled Dr. Luke jackhammer dance-pop was over. Maybe people wanted to hear quiet, personal, insular pop music now. Maybe Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used To Know” wasn’t a one-off; maybe it heralded some bigger change. That impression was right and wrong at the same time. “Royals” succeeded two different Dr. Luke tracks at #1, and plenty of Luke tracks followed it to the top. But things were shifting, and the present pop landscape would look a whole lot different if “Royals” never happened.
For a moment, Lorde was a phenomenon. She was a reluctant pop star who didn’t look, talk, move, or act like a pop star. But her pop stardom was genuine, and her debut album Pure Heroine became a real cultural bellwether. She seemed like the future, but that’s not what she wanted to be. In the decade-plus since “Royals,” Lorde has kept an inconsistent schedule, going dormant for long stretches and finding herself further and further from the zeitgeist whenever she returns. That’s fine with her. She doesn’t want to dominate. Cult stardom continues to work just fine. But “Royals” changed the idea of what a #1 hit could be, and we’re still living in its aftermath.
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